A Bouquet of Roses
by Masu Trout
Summary: Every true kunoichi is like a flower. It is a lesson that Ino has learned and never forgotten. Oneshot, Inocentric


**Standard disclaimer applies.**

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"Good Kunoichi are like flowers," Ino's mother once said, and that, Ino knows, is true.

It is true, but it is not the whole truth of it. A kunoichi should be like a flower, hair arranged and body held in just the right way to attract men, her very presence like petals opening to say, _Look at me_.

Those who cannot draw attention, who are too plain to be anything other than ferns- they get trampled on, unnoticed. Ino has seen it a thousand times, both in the garden she tends and out in the field. (Though really, what is the field other than a bigger garden, one that is sown with young shinobi and watered with missions and blood until they sprout into killers? Everything comes back to plants, one way or another.)

Others cannot even stand to be flora. They lash out with animal instinct at the slightest provocation, unable to stand there and have their petals be stroked, stems handled with admiring care. They, the weeds and thistles, get uprooted before they even have a chance. It is tragic, but no one comes to a garden to see a weed, no matter how beautiful it is.

But still, just because a kunoichi is a flower does not mean she will succeed. There are those, lilies and sunflowers and snapdragons who go out into the field being, quite simply, too beautiful. Mostly, they don't come back, and when they do they are broken, missing the thing that made them who they were, made them able to function as something other than flowers. Their stems have been clipped, and there is nothing to do but put them in water and wait for them to waste away.

Sometimes, Ino sits with these girls in the hospital, gives them medicine and tells them about what is going on in the world around them. (She hates to admit it, but their faces all blur together after a while.) She knows it won't help, but each one of them had promise, and she can't help feel guilty that they could not live up to it. (Would a different arrangement have helped? Less sunshine? More training?) It is a shame, because all of them were so close to being true kunoichi.

But even though they were flowers, they still failed, and that is the piece Ino's mother was missing all those years ago, back when Ino was still just a little girl, selling bouquets at the front counter of their little shop while her daddy went out and made Konoha's enemies kill each other, horror etched on their faces. (Ino has tried that same technique herself. It was affective, but hardly worth the nightmares it gave her afterwards.) Ino is a flower, sure, but she isn't just any common garden plant. Ino is a rose.

She knows how to attract men, swarming around her like bees in the summer. She lets them in, too, inhaling the scent of her petals in a movement of pure bliss, admiring and desiring until

–snap.-

Ino has thorns. Unlike the rest of the garden flowers, she breaks people rather than being broken. She has reached into a hundred thousand minds and shattered them all with a timing that greater fighters would kill for. Ino is, above all, a good kunoichi- she knows how and when to draw blood, never too soon and never too late. She walks a fine line between life and death, sanity and psychosis, but she has never once looked back.

(And if it has made her a little confused herself, what of it?)

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**Chances are, Ino is a perfectly well adjusted, sane individual. But that wouldn't be nearly as fun to write about. I've always thought the concept of being able to go into someone else's mind, and the affects of doing so, would be kind of interesting, and Ino is a great character to explore that with. In this story, the confusion brought on by a hundred seduction and interrogation missions, as well as knowing exactly what her targets are going through as she kills them, has caused her to retreat into her own version of reality. I hope that was at least partially obvious.**

**Please, this is a very different style than my norm, so I am really desperate for concrit (or any sort of review, really).**


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